23 Signs You Need A Break from Search Marketing

Call me a copycat but I am inspired to do my version after I saw the 21 signs you need a break from SEO by Small Business SEM.

You think you’ve got too much search engine optimization/marketing (SEO/SEM) on your mind? Take the following survey honestly to gauge if you need a break from SEM. All items are answerable by Yes or No.

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1. You mention the acronyms SEO and SEM half the time you spent on a prospect or a client.
2. You keep on trying to get a reputable domain name that contains “seo”, “searchengine”, “search” or “sem” after several failed attempts.
3. You spend 20% of your day reading SEOMoz, SERoundtable, Search Engine Land, SEO Book and Search Engine Watch.

Live Search, Where’s Your Sitemap Promise?

I wonder how you guys feel about Steve Ballmer. Reading his controversial — if not downright insane — messages, watching him act like a front act rock star in a Microsoft gathering and his words belittling Google’s growth are just a few of these attention grabbing stunts I see in him. I doubt if his Swiss-Belarussian ancestry has to do with it but it appears that fellow billionaire dropouts Bill Gates, Larry Ellison, Steve Jobs and Michael Dell are more educated than him.

Enough of that Bomber Ballmer rant.

MSN Live Search excitedly promised last November about Google and Yahoo!’s coming together to support Sitemaps. And while they did not promise what exact date they will roll their version, Ken Moss’ MSDN blog mentioned that

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Has MSN Able to Right the Ship?

Search Engine Roundtable features a thread found at at Webmasterworld, questioning the performance of MSN Search after more than two years since it was launched. Unlike Yahoo! and Google, MSN hasn’t gone off to a respectable position in search engine world. No wonder the replies to the initial post, so far, were unsurprisingly hostile:

Every person who worked on this project should be fired

Honestly, they haven’t gotten anything right. I have 90 pages in their index compared to 140,000 in Yahoo and I don’t think I’m alone in this. I have all static URL’s so that’s not the problem, the bot just doesn’t crawl. The serps are ridiculously bad. They’re so embarrassing msndude won’t even show up anymore…lol. I could go on and on….

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Using MSN’s linkfromdomain command

MSN Live Search recently released the linkfromdomain tool that will determine which pages a certain site links to. In effect, this is the reverse of another existing command linkdomain, which displays the identity of the pages that link to the site (also known as backlinks).

For example, to determine which sites provided a link to www.seo-hongkong.com, I will use linkdomain:www.seo-hongkong.com

But to determine which sites www.seo-hongkong.com is linking to (without going to the site and examining its links), I will use linkfromdomain:www.seo-hongkong.com.

If you think that’s it, you’re mistaken; the tool offers flexibility in combining with other commands to further drill on how a site does its linking or check a link partner if he/she did fulfill the agreed link exchange.

So if I am the owner of www.cagape.com (I am) and want to check if www.sfc-hongkong.org web site promised to put a link to my site, I will enter the following command at Live Search: site:cagape.com linkfromdomain:www.sfc-hongkong.org

If the result is blank then someone is in trouble. Obviously, the pages have to be indexed before this command works, just like linkdomain, site and related commands.